we´re starting a creative team project with my art-drummer-boyfriend-of-my-girlfriend´s-best-friend-friend. the idea is to work outside of agencies, independent, freelance style, for outside the country international stuff or down the street kicking it; do whatever we can on our own time, be it work or not. we want to do fun, cool, creative shit. if we can inspire some clients with our passion, great. that´s the idea of the idea. duality, business and pleasure. so, let´s get to it!
here´s the businessweb.

i´ve always liked Ikea sites, Ikea in general really, who doesn´t? and now they´ve surprised me again. i found this on the Kaiser blog. apparently it´s a live feed and this guy Nils is sitting in a room waiting for September. the best part is you can call him up from where ever and talk to him yourself: +49 40 22 61 11 61.

i imagine that in September that gloomy looking room is going to change into something more Ikea-like, we´ll just have to see.

i´ve been interested in company blogs for some time now. ever since i started thinking about CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). so, today i decided to look some up and found the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. here´s some thoughts on the findings:

the first one i looked into was a blog from Boeing called Randy´s blog. first thing that struck me was the name. it´s a cool blog, it´s how i think a company blog should be. Randy is vice president of marketing for Boeing but he doesn´t seem to be, the blog feels like it´s just some guy that works in the company that has a camera and takes pictures and talks about where the company takes him and, this is important, he talks about himself and what he feels and how he sees things.

then i saw the Coca-Cola Conversations blog by Phil Mooney. it´s a nice blog, but it isn´t what i expected. the thing is that Phil is a historian for coke, he´s been one for the company for over 30 years, so most of the stuff on the blog has to do with archives and Coca-Cola history. and i was expecting something more of conversations as the names suggests. also, he doesn´t seem to be getting a lot of comments, this might be due to the topics, even though he says that the blog will only work if it´s a two way dialogue, and i agree! but he doesn´t seem to be engaging in conversations. there are a lot of great coke memorabilia though!

Direct2Dell is a good company blog, maybe too companyish for my taste but still good. it´s one of those blogs where everyone pitches in and some times has a colloquial tone and others a professional one. by companyish i mean there´s a guy called Lionel Menchaca who is ´Chief Blogger´. nice to see how the people at dell conduct business and present their new laptops, like on this post. little feedback, companyish? :S

same thing for the Delta Air Lines blog. it´s great to see everyone pitching in, but they all seem to say things in the same manner. like every post ends with a something something!

GE Global Research blog is like the two blogs above but has a latest news feel to it. GE this, GE that, maybe something about the research guys beating the developers guys in softball, not much personal insight into working culture, the little things, even though the blogging roles are shared and there are plenty of contributors.

kind of the same for the GM Fastlane blog. except it´s a lot more colloquial, sounds like the guys speak their mind and i like that, in fact i think that´s what attracts me most about blogging basically. this one also has a lot of feedback and it´s no surprise, by the way it´s written it´s easier to relate to what they say.

on HP´s page they´ve made a list of the ´employee business blogs´. the topics and way of blogging is varied but most of them don´t have a lot of comments. now, there is something interesting to see, the ´employee personal interest blogs´. these blogs truly are windows into people´s lives and thoughts. not a lot of comments either but very interesting nonetheless.

On Jhonson & Jhonson´s blog there´s a couple of guys blogging from Beijijng, doing the Voices from Beijijng series. it´s a nice casual blog with everyday life in China rants. it´s like they say, "we will try to find a voice that often gets lost in formal communications". no comments though.

the Marriot has Marriot on the Move written by the very own Bill Marriott, Chairman & CEO of Marriott International! how does this guy find the time? it´s pretty news flashy, not a lot of insight into Bill Marriot´s life as Bill Marriot of Marriot. feels like someone else is writting it, but i may be wrong. they are getting some feedback, but they´re about how good the hotels are and not about the posts.

here´s one of the first that i´ve found to be explicitely CSR oriented. it´s McDonald´s Open for Discussion written by Bob Langert, Vice President for CSR at McD´s. at first sight it looks like a newspaper, after digging through it a bit i found some interesting stuff, like videos of employee perspectives and all that jazz. it´s a great iniciative but it´s still too formated, too branded for my taste. not too many comments on this one.

Microsoft has a huge blog community. i looked some up using the keyword: personal. 8 blogs showed up. i looked through a couple and this one stood out. it´s out dated but it is wonderful from the beggining, the guy telling how he got an idea for a non profit organization and how he got inspired by seeing a homeless guy and trying to experiment by being homeless himself! this is beautiful stuff! and yes, it´s the post with the most feedback.

Southwest´s Nuts about Southwest blog is ok. i like how they´ve networked everything on Facebook, Youtube, Flickr etc. don´t know about the quirky videos and some of the posts. they do get some comment flow.

i love the idea of Starbuck´s Ideas in Action Blog but i don´t like the blog. Hi everyone! yada. this blog could be about so much more. like a close up look on coffee lovers culture and the people who work at starbucks. it does get some feedback, but it´s not too engaging i guess.

Walmart´s Check Out blog is pretty cool. nice posts, by different people, networked, good design, sustanability oriented, not a lot of feedback on it though.

one of the things i think about when i think of CSE (Corporate Social Responsability) is that: if you want to say social responsability, start with social, because if you go with truth and you´re as responsible as you say, just show what you´re made of.

this has to do with the use of media, enter blogs. and there´s a lot of truth in a company employee writing about his life. even if he doesn´t write about the company itself the place where you work at is in your life.

CSR is in everyday things. but instead of formal news flashes i think it´s a lot cooler to see how bob who works in X changed all his light bulbs to reduce his carbon foot print. or read what he thinks, or what he sees in his business trips.

following up on the proud of my uni post, a professor sent me this today:Chats on the web. a new mediatic proposal from the Direction of Multimedial Communication through a series of interviews that can be seen on the National University of Rosario´s website.

With the intention of covering the most diverse topics, the Direction of Multimedial Communication invites everyone to view the series of interviews on their website called Café 2.0 Interviews on the web. The new communicational space that goes together with the web news UNR Vlog TV, has the mission of delivering the readers interviews to different personalities that in one way or the other stand out in their discipline and has some sort of vinculation with university life.

With an agile format and an easy language, Café 2.0 tries to be be a chatting space, with distended conversations where the guests can share their ideas about the topics that concern them, from a place that doesn´t pretend to be strictly academic but a journalistic disclosure of knowledge and the daily life of the interviewed person.

With a 15 day frequence, 9 minutes of lenght and with Marcelo Colman as host, Café 2.0 presents itself to different reknown researches, professors, scientists and personalities in this chatting and meeting space to the issues that might be interesting to cover and be exposed to the mass public.

For this first cast you can watch and interview in two part with Dr. Carlos Scolari, specialist in digital communication.

You can access Café 2.0 through a link on the multimedia player at the right column in our portal or directly entering the YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/cafe20unr

sorry if the translation is a bit quirky and the lack of links, since i pasted this from word, the code got all f upped.the institutional tone of it isn´t of my liking. things like mass public, multimedia player, sounds from the time when the home music set was furniture, but oh, well.

i have a lot more things to post about, but i just don´t have the time. working at the agency and on a personal project, so tic toc. be back soon as i can. cheers.